Since it has been brought to my attention that I should probably explain what this thing even is (how did that not occur to me? )...

TFSB is intended to become a total conversion mod that takes place shortly after vanilla FTL, placing the player in command of a Rebel ship running away from the Federation, trying to reunite with the Rebel fleet. The current alpha build, though, just makes you command Rebel ships while trying to achieve the Federation's goals.

The final sector will be similar to the regular one, but the flagship battle will be against a new Federation flagship (if I don't get my hands on some decent models for that, it'll be the Osprey) and its two escort cruisers (if the flagship is the Osprey, then they'll be Kestrels. If not, they'll be Ospreys.) as the Rebels desperately attempt to turn the tide once again and deal the Federation a crippling blow.

Re-re-edit: More screenshots. Just hangar pictures this time. The Reaper is basically the Kestrel, but reskinned with a new floor layout and 4 starting crew. If I'm not mistaken, the upper empty room is the cloaking device, the lower one is drone control, and the room between the medbay and door control is the teleporter.

Transport 018 (all of the names are subject to change, really) is more like the Engi A, but at the same time, it's nothing like the Engi A. While the Torus needs the drone to be capable of dealing damage, the drone is simply the Transport's way of compensating for the lower damage output of its dual lasers. I do not remember anything about the layout for this one, not even vaguely.

The Dominator starts with an impressive drone arsenal AND firepower equal to the Reaper. At full capacity, this formidable dreadnought is capable of rivaling the deadliest of Federation warships, but make no mistake - it was badly damaged once before, and the Rebels are lucky to have managed to rebuild it in the first place, and restoring it to its former glory will be a difficult process.

It has a powerful new cannon, the Ionized Heavy Laser Cannon (subject to change), which fires 3 shots (lucky number, I guess...) each dealing 2 ion damage and 2 regular damage. However, it requires a substantial 150 scrap to become operational, and you will need to spend tons of extra scrap and energy if you want to get any significant results out of it.

The Red-Tail, having been placed instead of the Nisos, is basically a clone of the original thing, but with a bit of added firepower. Until they are capable of powering both of its formidable drones, Red-Tail captains must choose between an ion drone capable of randomly hitting targets throughout the ship with a low-power ion burst, or a missile drone capable of equally randomly piercing the enemy shields with missiles, dealing 1 damage each. Batteries not included. Oh, wait, they are! For one or the other.

Drone AA-81 is an upgraded auto-assault drone ship, incapable of supporting crew in any way. Upgraded with a repair drone capable of traversing its narrow maintenance conduits, AA-81 starts with basic shielding, an anti-bio beam, a low-power ion cannon, and a mini beam - and only enough power to run 2 of them at any given time. It also has basic engines, and rudimentary drone systems capable of running the repair drone if one of its other systems is offline or only partially active, and extremely sturdy blast doors (lvl 3). Replaces the Torus (Engi A). 4 weapon and 2 drone slots.

Drone AS-2901 is also an upgraded drone, but this one is designed for scouting and support - and its systems reflect it. Equipped with a Mk II burst laser and a basic laser cannon, AS-2901 also has drone systems, but is also incapable of powering either its beam drone or its repair drone while all other systems are active. Its main strength, however, lies in its ability to manipulate FTL drives to amazing effect (advanced navigation, FTL recharge booster, and FTL jammer augments) and its advanced sensor suite (lvl 3). Replaces the Vortex (Engi B). 3 weapon and 3 drone slots.

0.2:- Auto-Cruiser by kartoFlane implemented, modified by me and replacing the Nesasio (Stealth A) - To make sure the UI doesn't break, a custom drone UI by speedoflight is also implemented- Courtesy of Superluminal's latest update and the FTL modding wiki, the Dominator's room layout will be altered to match the NPC version, with the exception of the doors leading from the corridors, cloaking room, and drone room to the weapon rooms - Furthermore, the doors leading from the above places on the Dominator to the weapon rooms will no longer act as airlocks, venting atmosphere out of the corresponding weapon room- TFSB will now have to be patched in after Captain's Edition 1.02 or later, assuming Sleeper Service hasn't caused any compatibility issues between later CE versions and the segments I'm using, which is unlikely - Several ships will have their weapons and/or drones replaced by various CE weapons. This is most easily noticeable with Drone AA-81, the Dominator, and the Red-Tail, and non-existent in the Reaper, and the Sovereign uses nothing but CE weapons

0.1: First release, Reaper, Transport, Dominator, Red-Tail, and both drones.

- I screwed up the Dominator's room layout, causing 2 of the doors that are SUPPOSED to be airlocks to become doors to... I don't even know where. The doors are in what used to be the beam room, and the cloaking room.- Several systems that do not exist on certain ships can be purchased by said ships. This is not something I can resolve on my end, however you can identify it by taking a look at its system levels while shopping. If there is no info on what the system does with # power, then the system does not exist. - Furthermore, life support has a cost of 0 scrap, but only ships that can't support life support systems can buy it, so no harm done.- The Sovereign sometimes lacks its second boarding drone. I believe it may be an FTL bug, as nothing appears to be wrong with its blueprint. While I did manage to bypass the issue, I don't have a clue as to how.

Last edited by dalolorn on Tue Jan 07, 2014 4:27 pm, edited 20 times in total.

UltraMantis wrote:You dont need GMM to make .ftl files GMM is needed to patch the files into the game for everyone else. You already have the files if you create them, you just need to distribute them.

Oh, I'm quite familiar with the way .ftl files work. It's just that it's going to take a bit of time to make one, as the ships have been quite firmly integrated into the unpacked XML files (and the resulting .dat files) and the extreme heat these days is severely limiting my time on the computer, so it's all spent playing Galactic Civilizations 2.

Edit: Or browsing these forums for about 30 minutes each time it crashes, which it's doing a lot today.

Re-edit (though considering the amount of time that's passed since the last edit, I'm not certain if I should just post again): I'm gonna work on getting a few more screenshots out, but because Steam obviously has no intention of being nice towards the [img] tags, I'll just make links and remove the existing pictures because they're just using a lot of space for inappropriate results. Coming up in about... 10 minutes? More if I make gameplay shots like those 3?

Right, drone ships will be done when this storm passes - which could be tomorrow or in a few minutes.

Edit: Good news! Getting ready to test the drones right now, and if everything goes well, the first release (ships only, as I'm not even remotely done modding events.xml yet) will be available for download!

Re-edit: Updating OP with data on the drone ships - screenshot links will be posted at the same time as the .ftl file for 0.1.

Re-re-edit: Yeah... I have a feeling that's not going anywhere. Superluminal's stubbornly refusing to output anything even vaguely resembling what it's displaying, which means I've got the hull in one place, and the shield bubble and rooms in another, and my only attempt at fixing it has only resulted in the offsetting of the shield bubble.

So, until I can figure out a way of fixing this without having to rebuild the whole thing from scratch, the whole thing is delayed, with no ETA whatsoever.

*tests the other drone* And not only is crew behavior somewhat... odd... on the drones, but I just had a repair drone crash the game while trying to get from drone control to the cockpit.

{unpacked resources that have your ships}and{unpacked resources from a vanilla dat}

Then copy/paste the named tags that contain those differences into *.xml.append files.

At this point, I'm not even doing any work on this mod anymore. Probably not going to continue unless I come up with a way to fix all the bugs in the last edit of my last post, which is a bit tricky as I have no idea what went wrong.

You'll have to do it by hand. It's not that difficult. Superluminal is a great tool and it makes some things easy but it cannot cope with every idea, and it doesnt completely replace editing numbers with Notepad.

If this page cannot help you tame your creation then maybe it's too ambitions for FTL's modding limitations. And i mean that in a friendly way.

UltraMantis wrote:You'll have to do it by hand. It's not that difficult. Superluminal is a great tool and it makes some things easy but it cannot cope with every idea, and it doesnt completely replace editing numbers with Notepad.

If this page cannot help you tame your creation then maybe it's too ambitions for FTL's modding limitations. And i mean that in a friendly way.

Actually, it's just a ship with no crew (a drone ship) and a very compact layout (due to the clumsy scale of the auto-assault and auto-scout models). As far as I can tell, there really should be no issues. Yet there are issues.

Edit: After reading Sleeper Service's last post in the CE thread, I'm beginning to wonder if I accidentally left a null room in the ship. Possibly even several of them.

Re-edit: Having come to this conclusion, the only logical course of action is to regenerate the scout_drone.txt and scout_drone.xml files, as well as their Auto-Assault counterparts, by creating dummy .shp files with rebuilt room layouts.